The governor of New Jersey has been ridiculed for attempting to deny he took his family for a day on the beach, shortly after he ordered it closed to the public.

The Republican governor was photographed relaxing at Island Beach on Sunday, lounging in a beach chair in sandals and a T-shirt with his family on an otherwise empty beach.

The beach was closed to the public over the popular Fourth of July weekend, along with other state beaches and parks, due to a government shutdown.

“I didn’t get any sun today,” Christie told reporters at a news conference later in the day in Trenton, despite photographs showing he and his family enjoying a day out on the otherwise deserted beach.

read more:

http://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/2017/07/04/us-governor-chris-christ...

I was too lazy to do a cartoon of Christie scratching his crotch, just imagine it...

It's just over three decades since Dire Straits immortalised their satirical free money formula in song.

Sadly, not all of us are skilled at Hawaiian noises or banging on the bongos like a chimpanzee, so we're not going to make it as rock legends on MTV, which itself has been usurped by YouTube anyway.

But what if you didn't have to be a rock star to get money for nothing?

What if, instead of humans installing microwave ovens and moving refrigerators, robots did it for us, and then we got paid to do nothing?

Much of the discussion about artificial intelligence and machines is cloaked in fear - the fear that they will take our jobs and leave the masses unemployed and destitute.

But what if there are some jobs - like custom kitchen deliveries and moving colour TVs - that we'd rather like them to take?

"I think we should embrace automation. The only problem we've got now is we're not embracing it," argued author and former BBC economics editor Paul Mason.

"We're paying people with degrees to make coffee. We are replacing machine car washes in Britain with hand car washes, where six guys with rags can undercut a machine."

It's long been a dream of futurists that machines might take over odious and repetitive tasks so that people might work less and enjoy more leisure.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-04/universal-basic-income-money-for-n...

I seem to live my life through cartoons... Not quite. But cartoons are an important part of my life since I did my first ones in 1951. Cartoons are pithy and usually designed to engage the mind into uncomfortable territory of our own hypocrisy. Being from Europe, cartoons and political satire has long been on my plate. But I have also studied in some details the Australian and American cartoonists, example of which I show from time to time on this site. My cartoons are more crass than pithy. That's deliberate. Politics has become crassier and going down hill into the shithouse at the speed of light. One cannot be too elegant while being fronted by someone like Tony Abbott whose main purpose in life is to be an annoyingly destructive little shit. 

Here is a "cartoon" illustration from Mad magazine July 2075, way before Lampoon Vacation and before Giles, that shows the family going on holidays... It's murder. Something is going to explode. Leisure can be dangerous:

(artist: George Woodbridge, writer: Lou Silverstone)

In regard to Australian cartoonists, I have a few originals from say Benier and others. I have seen originals from Larry Pickering (a right-wing cartoonists). I rabbled a lot about Bill Leak (another right-wing cartoonist. Note: Giles moved from the hard-left to the soft rightwing). Some of the best cartoonist were also fully-fledged artists or story tellers like Norman Lindsay and D H Souters... Some were racists, misogynists and supremacists. I hope I personally stay true to a wholesome humanity. And there are plenty more. The same goes for American cartoonists. 

Note: I did some "pithy" cartoons for Australian publications — under a different name of course...